


Magicks

by Dargelos (Dargie)



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: A/U, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-11
Updated: 2010-01-11
Packaged: 2017-10-06 04:18:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/49629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dargie/pseuds/Dargelos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not all magicks learned at Hogwarts are learned from books.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Magicks

Not all magicks at Hogwarts are the stuff of potions, incantations and curses. Not all magicks are learnt from books. Some happen all of a sudden -- a young girl looks up at a friend and sees, suddenly, not the red-haired boy who alternately annoys and amuses her, but a young man who makes her feel oddly special, thoroughly female. And she dreams that night, not of studies and spells, but of dances and dresses, and kisses soft and tentative.

Frothy, happy magicks of the heart, all new and shiny, shimmer around the school, especially in the spring when even the roughest sow's ear takes on a silken appearance to someone, when the house elves cuddle and coo beneath stairs, and Mrs. Norris preens for an orange tom who sings to her outside the back entrance to the castle on warm nights.

 

Some, a long time coming, are incendiary magicks, when two lovers give in to the longings of their hearts and bodies and become one. Then all differences, all anger and disappointments drop away, and what is left is pure fire leaping from fingertips to quivering flesh, spinning dreams of the future, of marriage, and magic-working, and children.

The searchlight brilliance of this magic is so strong that no shadow can fall on them. They will never see the enemy wrapping himself around them, around their friends, and their unborn child. Compared to this magic incarnate, even the most profound spells seem clumsy and amateurish. This is magic that holds the universe in suspension, magic that stops the dance of stars. It is life throwing back its head and howling.

 

Still other love magicks are patient. A young man has waited, he has stood beside his beloved and said no word of love to him. He has watched while his beloved has hungered for another, and said no word of reproach to either. He believes that one day Sirius will see him as more than a friend. The wolf knows how to wait.

Then, on a morning after a full moon, he wakes in the forest, cradled in ferns, wrapped in strong arms. He knows the hands resting on chest and thigh belong to Sirius, and he sighs. "Are you all right?" Soft whisper close to his ear. Warm, low. He shivers. "Are you cold?" He has never been less cold. He turns in the arms of his beloved, skin to skin at last, mouth to mouth.

It is the thoughtless sexual heat of the young, fire in the belly, cocks stiff at the ready, and the taste of sex lush in their mouths. Limbs, fingers, tongues viney, entwining, as if they could grow into one another, consume one another in this raging heat. But the beating of their hearts in the aftermath, and the shared breath that carries their "I love you" back and forth says that it is more than the frenzied conjunction of bodies, more than a conjugation -- I want, I have taken, I shall hold you now, until the moon falls from the sky.

As the dew burns away, as they rise and find their discarded clothing, he says to Sirius, his dog-star, the brightest light in the vault of this new heaven : "Wolves mate for life." And they both understand patience for the magic it is. Call love to you long enough, and it will come.

 

Some are older magicks, changeable yet constant, and clear in the voice of a woman who has, for decades, called her lover by his given name only in private moments. And the man who hears her soft "Albus?" late at night, looks up and sees, beyond the tartan primness, and the grizzled hair, severely plaited, sees the girl she was as clearly as if they were both still sixteen and newly in love.

She lies down beside him and holds him as she has always done. She is his rock. The fire is mostly embers now, but the magic of it is this: It never dies. And to those who are gifted with this special magic is the ability to understand and sympathize with both the dark and the light of it.

 

And the dark side is this: A young man sits alone and tells himself that there is nothing else in the world less powerful than this love magic. It matters not at all; it does not even exist he says, and in saying, affirms its power. He looks down, out of the window of his room, and sees the boy he once thought he loved. "Who is he to reject me?" he wonders bitterly, and his vision darkens as he sees the boy greet another with the tender kiss of new lovers. At that moment something shrivels inside of him and he makes a dark vow never to love again. Not man, not woman, not wise-eyed wolf under a fat, luminous moon.

This is the magic of outcasts, a dark and terrible casting of self into the reaches beyond the human heart. He is transforming himself into a shadow, a master of wolf's bane and vitriol, who hangs suspended like the Cumaean Sibyl in jars of potions which can mimic the thing he desires most, but never equal it. This dark magic is an endless cruciatus that hollows him until he is shadow within as well as without.

 

At Hogwarts, they teach you the controllable magicks done with a wave of the wand, a few well-chosen herbs, or words inflected just so. It is a thing of rules, a shopping list of the miraculous, both big and small. But the greatest miracle is this: to reach out and find the thing that fills your soul, and makes whole the heart beating within you. Embrace it or deny it, but it will come, and there is no spell on earth that will match it for joy or pain. Unteachable, unstoppable, the magicks of the heart.

**Author's Note:**

> Written well before Rowling outed Dumbledore, but because of that, an a/u.


End file.
